


The Thing With Feathers

by gladdecease



Category: Fake News FPF, Green Lantern (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Hope, Superpowers, Zombies (sort of)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-26 01:04:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/644832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gladdecease/pseuds/gladdecease
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, as it turned out, the thing with Magical Science Superpower Rings!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing With Feathers

**Author's Note:**

> [For reference](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackest_Night). My GL knowledge is very incomplete, and I've never written TDS before; this is most definitely me cautiously going where I've never gone before. Concrit is very much appreciated, though whether I'll put it to use or chicken out and leave this unfinished remains to be seen.

Jon shuffled his script, tapped the pages back into line, and waited for the cue to return from commercial break. The audience cheered, a light turned green, and he got a nod from the staffer with the biggest clipboard on set; that was as good a go-ahead signal as he was going to get. He turned to face Camera 1, pushed as many of his wildly fluctuating emotions down as possible, and began.

"And now, on to tonight's top story. As some of you may have already heard, dozens if not hundreds of people we all thought gone for good have returned from parts unknown, with the express purpose of breaking our hearts, crushing our souls, and bringing about the end of our very existence. And for once, I'm not talking about Congress at the beginning of a new session." A photo of the current old-white-man majority, self- and others-hating, will to live-ruining governmental body went up on the screens. The audience laughed, and Jon waited until it trailed off to let the reluctant grin fall off his face. "No, I'm afraid this is, impossible as it sounds, much worse. Chuck?"

Video rolled of the various, fleeting shots reporters and ordinary citizens alike had gotten of the creatures - men and women in masks and spandex and oddly placed body armor, familiar but for the black and white color scheme and the greying, decayed flesh. News clips followed of different networks' reactions to the previously dead superheroes appearing to attack anybody they could find, taking only a single touch to the chest to render them catatonic. The reactions ranged from stunned to horrified to (in one stunningly horrifying case) a grim lecture on all the newscaster had learned from movies about surviving a zombie apocalypse.

Jon shot a flat look at the camera after that last one, pulling a laugh out of the audience, if a weak one. "Zombie apocalypse." He stretched the words out like an old rubber band: slowly, gently, and concerned that something was about to snap. "It sounds crazy, but it's the closest thing a layperson has to compare these things to. After all, they are, as John Stewart (Green Lantern, friend of the show and despite rumors to the contrary _not_ the black version of me) put it," Jon held the blue sheaf of script pages out at arms length, squinting. "The bodies of dead superheroes and supervillains brought back to life by what we are calling "Black Lantern rings", which fill these now undead "Black Lanterns" with a fierce, unending desire to pull out and eat the hearts of their victims."

A concerned murmuring went up in the crowd. Jon nodded sympathetically. "Yeah, who would've guessed the movies got it so wrong?" Laughter. "That's gotta be embarrassing for George Romero. I mean, that's like saying it turns out werewolves are susceptible to gold instead of silver! That vampires _love_ garlic, that they eat it by the pound!" Jon paused in faked contemplation. "Which would explain why they need to use their psychic mind powers to get a girl..." A photo of Bela Lugosi as Dracula side-by-side with one of Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen popped up on the screens. Catcalls went up in the crowd. "Since appearances are obviously not the deterrent they once were.

"Now you may be thinking, 'Wait, Jon, I watched all those clips same as you, and _I_ didn't see anybody's hearts getting ripped out.' To which I say: thank God." A bit of tittering. "And also: fair point. See, as it turns out, the Black Lanterns aren't interested in your still beating, bloody muscle of an organ, but your _emotional_ heart." Aahs of comprehension filled the room; Jon spread his hands wide in the universal gesture for _right?_ "Now, me personally, I don't get why they don't go for the _brain_ in that case, where all of human science has led us to believe our emotions, our personalities, our - our souls, if you will, reside, but eh..." He shrugged. "It's a metaphor! Apparently. That... has real world applications! Somehow!" He gave the camera a desperately confused look for a moment, before waving all of it off in a fit of pique. "What do I know, I don't even get how _Green_ Lantern rings work, never mind these fancy new black ones." His hands flailed wildly. "Magicy science! Sciencey magic! Whatever! It works, is the point. We don't need to know how."

Calming down, he continued, "What we do need to know - the one thing Mr. Crazypants with the AK-47 and the flamethrower we heard from earlier got right - is what we can do to stop them. _If_ we can do anything to stop them. They are, after all, some of the world's greatest heroes and worst villains. Sure, they died before, but that was at the hands of big shots! You know, all... three? four? of them that are willing to kill. We can't compete with that! Luckily, it turns out we're not supposed to.

"Hal Jordan, another of Earth's Green Lanterns (they're supposed to guard multiple solar systems worth of space and we've got _four_ of them here on Earth, I don't know how we managed that), explained to fellow superheroes earlier today that only the power of a Green Lantern ring, combined with others of the spectrum, can kill a Black Lantern." Confused whispers broke out in the audience. Jon tapped his sheaf of pages into a neat, orderly stack to have something to do with his hands. "I - I don't really know what he's referring to by "spectrum" there, although given that we've heard of Green and Black, it's not inconceivable that there are other colored lanterns out there, somewhere." He perked up. "Ooh, maybe they have to let their powers combine into a _Rainbow_ Lantern to defeat the Black Lanterns once and for all!" An appropriately photoshopped image appeared on the screens, and the audience took the easy bait, laughing again.

Jon turned to Camera 3. "But seriously, folks." This was Jon at his Most Sober, hands flat on the table, no joke to break the tension, nothing left to lighten the mood. "It's pretty obvious, there's nothing we can do. There's - there's barely anything Earth's _finest_ can do, never mind _us_. And while four of them on a planet is a pretty high concentration of Green Lanterns, they're outnumbered twenty to one, ten to one at _least_. It's gonna take them time to get through those numbers, and during that time we're gonna be sitting ducks. A buffet of delicious roast ducks, just lined up waiting to be eaten. Basically: we're f*cking screwed." A small burst of laughter from the audience at that, mostly an automatic reaction to Jon swearing on the show. When he didn't react, not even a twitch, they quieted fast.

"Here's the thing. We've got to believe they can pull it off anyway. Because right now, giving into despair, panicking, _rioting_ \- these things aren't going to help us. They're only going to put us in harm's way, and make the Lanterns' jobs that much harder. So please, if you're watching this, stay safe. Stay inside, if you can, and if you can't, at least go in the opposite direction of the explosions? That's your best chance of staying out of the way of these guys.

"And, if you can, try to have hope. Right now, it's the best weapon we've got. Thank you." The audience burst into applause, cheering, and Jon felt something warm creeping up his spine, loosening the chill grip that panic and worry had on the set of his shoulders. He relaxed, minimally, and let a small twitch of a smile lift the corners of his lips. "We'll be right - "

And then the glowing blue ring dropped through the ceiling, falling a few feet before coming to a halt maybe six inches away from Jon's face, right in his line of sight.

Jon squinted at it for a moment before managing a flat "What the f*ck?"

[ _Jon Stewart,_ ] the ring... there was no other word for it, _intoned_. No, seriously, there was really no other word for it. Brian Williams _wished_ he had this kind of gravitas.

Jon's shoulders hunched and he leaned over, unconsciously making himself look as tiny and nonthreatening as possible. Okay, maybe not _un_ consciously. "Yes?" he squeaked.

[ _You are a beacon of hope on this world, inspirational to many in the face of disaster and destruction. You would make a worthy member of the Blue Lantern Corps._ ]

Jon's jaw dropped. "Speak of the f*cking devil," he muttered, then said about an octave higher, "Seriously? _Me_? You sure you got the right guy here? I mean, come _on_ , I'm a late night talk show host, not the next Gandhi!" But his audience seemed to have picked up that something was happening here, and started cheering. And, not that Jon was about to go anthropomorphizing a ring that could _talk_ , but it was floating _pretty_ judgmentally at him right about then. As if to say _see? Totally worthy._

"I - " But wasn't he just saying everybody should be using the best weapons they had? Sure, he'd been talking in the abstract, about not taking this opportunity to kick the world in the balls while it was down, but now here was something that could actually, literally, _physically_ hurt those Black Lanterns trying to destroy the world. And it wanted him to be the one to do it.

Who was he to say no to that?

"Alright," Jon said, and if anything the cheers got louder. The ring dropped into the palm of his hand, and he only paused once while putting it on to ask, "Is this - this isn't gonna put me in spandex like the other Lanterns, is it? Only I - spandex is not a good look on me, is all." A few people laughed, and there were one or two whoops and wolf-whistles from near the back of the audience that politely disagreed with him. The ring, for its part, merely shoved itself on his finger, and once it got in position squeezed just tight enough to stay on.

The world went a blinding white-blue, and though Jon was sure the noise hadn't stopped, it faded to so much white noise in his ears.

Time passed, though he couldn't say how much.

When he regained his senses, people were still whistling and screaming and clapping. Jon was, praise God, _not_ in spandex. He was, in fact, wearing a gray shirt and khakis. The gray might've been a bit bluer in hue than he usually got, and the pattern on the ring was printed discretely in black and white on a lower corner of his shirt, but otherwise... not bad.

Oh, and he was glowing slightly, that white-blue color kind of hovering on the edges of his skin and clothes. That was weird.

And also he was floating a foot above his desk.

"Alright," Jon said again, grinning widely. The noise was reaching a fever-pitch, and it wasn't just the audience now; staff and cast and crew were applauding too. For a second Jon could've sworn he saw someone wiping at their eye. But somehow he didn't think it was just the sound and sight he was feeling - there was something more in the air, a tangible sense of... something his ring really, really liked - a lot. Three guesses what _that_ was. "Alright," he said a third time, calming down. "So, uh, sorry to cut the episode short - " People laughed, of course they did. He was good at that, at making people hope by making them laugh, by reassuring them that there was still some light in the world, if you just squinted and peered into the darkness long enough. " - but it looks like I've got other plans." The cheering started up again, and he had to shout over them to be heard. "Go, find your families, stay safe, stay inside if you can manage it. Look out for each other, and hope for the best! That's what I'll be doing, anyway," and as he said it, his ring ( _his_ ring, holy _crap_ ) flashed bright blue.

He grinned again, though it felt like he had yet to stop smiling. "Now, here it is: your Moment of Zen." And with that, he flew, one arm in front of his face (that's right, _suck it_ Superman!) out the hole in the ceiling the ring had made, cheers and the tingling sensation of pure _belief_ following in his wake.

And sure, it was a little cheesy. Sure, it meant he had to navigate some unfamiliar corridors to find his way outside (like _The Daily Show_ could afford a top floor studio, now _that's_ a joke), but the way his whole body was buzzing with the hope he'd given that room, he knew it was worth it.


End file.
